Killer Snake Wreacks Havoc in Harajuku

As if it wasn't congested enough, megaphone toting police had to be brought in for crowd control as all of Harajuku looked on in terror while this snake slithered up and down the station street sign this afternoon. Imagine my glee every time it threatened to slink down the pole, sending goth lolis and drag queens running and screaming in all directions!

Banned in the Name of Good Taste

Banning a product is a gamble by the powers that be. They always run the risk of garnering negative publicity for the thing they hoped to burn with the trash, a lesson exemplified by the surge of interest in the otherwise niche woman stalking simulation Rape Lay after the British Parliament rallied to smite it from Amazon.com.

As Oscar Wilde once said, "the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about," and indeed, sometimes the ban hammer has the desired effect and obliterates its quarry from the public conscious. Lucky for the reader, we're here to open up old wounds and maybe add a dash of salt in the process. Never forget!

Dakko-Chan

If this toy makes you uncomfortable, it's because it reminds you have racist you are.

From kogals with loose socks to Shibuya gyaru with fearsome fake nails and blinged-out rhinestone cell phones, high school girls have always been the front runners of obnoxious fashion trends. The post-war generation was no exception and jumped out of the gates in 1960 with Kinobori Winky, an inflatable vinyl doll that hung on you arm and winked at passersby with its lenticular eyes.

Lovingly christened by the media as Dakko-Chan (something akin to "Little Huggums"), this innocent tar baby rode the arms of schoolgirls across the nation to define a generation. The hottest thing to hit that summer, it was an overnight success and demand far outstripped supply. Storefronts were hammered by waves of customers waiting to buy redemption tickets, which gave them the privilege to line up again later for a chance to buy the actual doll. Nearly 2.5 million units were moved in just six months—everyone was in love with Dakko-Chan. 


Well, nearly everyone. Detractors criticized the hugging mechanism as undermining the moral fiber of society, and the winking gimmick as downright poppycock. Not to mention attacks from human rights groups who, in the 1988 anime and manga reforms, called out the toy’s black skin, swollen lips, and bushman skirt as racially insensitive.

This was all directed at a country who doesn’t know a golliwog from Mister Popo or Pokemon's Jynx. The maker Takara Tomi caved in and eventually released variant colors sans the outrageous lips, setting the stage for Bobby Ologun to take his rightful place as the average citizen’s first exposure to an African stereotype. Ironically, with all the effort put into making Dakko-Chan politically correct, nothing has been done to subdue the spread of Japanese hip-hop and reggae, something truly offensive to persons of good conscious the world over.

Everyone’s Ta-Bo


Proof positive that ignorance is bliss.

With his eyes fused shut in bliss and a chronic case of slack jaw, Ta-Bo was Sanrio’s answer to the motivational posters loved by school guidance counselors. Go to bed early and get up earlier! Smile and the world smiles with you! This positive propaganda machine was born in 1984 to slowly fade from greeting cards and stationary as we moved into a cynical 21st century.

Reasoning follows that the character was cycled out due to a lack of popularity, but it’s easy to connect the dots leading to a sinister, though equally rational conclusion—mouth breathing space case Ta-Bo was seen as an offensive caricature of mentally handicapped children and was pushed off the market by irate parent groups. 

Ta-Bo’s profile is still up on the official Sanrio site, leading the author to believe that they’ve made his disappearance a public secret to avoid further inquiry. Hang in there, baby! 


King Piccolo

How many fingers am I holding up?

So-called "reverse racism" in the form of initiatives such as Affirmative Action can be viewed as the White Man finally coughing up back taxes for their social lottery winnings. The plight of the privileged makes itself known in Japan as well, for their homogeneous society beguiles a legacy of class-based discrimination whose reparations are being paid for even today. I’m talking about the untouchable caste, the invisible Buraku.



The pre-Meiji system was one of rigid castes determined at birth with little hope for upward mobility. The upper crust composed of rich samurai and aristocrats sailed by on the sweaty backs of the peasants who tended their fields. But below even the proletariat was another group who took on the tasks deemed uncleanly by Buddhist scriptures—most notably butchering livestock and tanning their hides.

 Damned by the Gods and shunned by their fellow man, the Buraku class were exiled to ghettos on the outskirts of the village.

Though the Meiji administration banned the caste system in 1869, it was difficult for ex-Buraku to wash away their social stigma, especially when their outcast roots could be easily traced back to the hamlet of their birth. There was even a secret gesture to call people out inconspicuously: Tuck in your thumb and show a palm of four fingers, representing the four-legged animals that Buraku tended to.

You can bet the special interest groups were not pleased with the original incarnation of Dragon Ball’s King Piccolo.

The studios were in a tizzy. How were they going to broadcast an anime where the main villain was perpetually giving Buraku the finger, so to speak? Lucky for them, author Toriyama Akira flubbed up in Volume 13 and drew Piccolo counting down from five—on five fingers! Executives jumped on this snafu and the version of the iconic character we know today was born. If anyone has info on four finger Piccolo merchandise send it my way!

For more information about Buraku and Japan's meat industry, check out our visit to the Shinagawa Central Wholesale Meat Market.

Shinjuku Drug Cats

After running this site for nearly a year our resolve has been worn down to the nub... We now join every other Japan blog in saying "LOL! CATS IN JAPAN ARE SO KAWAII AND WACKY!!!" Almost.

When I saw a crazed mob over a hundred strong swarming a street corner in Shinjuku, my first thought was that they must be giving out those Tenga eggs again so I hopped right into the line. Imagine my disappointment when I squeezed my way to the front and found a family of cats asleep on a traffic signal box. Everyone else, however, was too ecstatic to notice that six feet away there stood a seriously creepy man dressed in cat hair, lurching over a pet cage and getting his rocks off gazing intently at the giddy young girls. He didn't even try to hide the fact that he tranquilized the poor things and planted them there for his own deviant pleasure.

Even Mangaka Get Motion Sickness!

A slew of mangaka, including TSB favorites Demerin Kaneko and George Akiyama, have created mini web comics for motion sickness medicine Travelmin (トラべルミン).

"If there is one thing that I teach you kids, let it be this: Adults get car sick too! I'm living proof!"

The company originally asked Kazuo Umezu to draw a comic in the style of Drifting Classroom, but due to acute tendinitis Demerin stepped up to pinch hit for him.

"It was then that I... a man's man like myself... got sea sick" George Akiyama

Ghoulish Local Tourism

The otherworldly hosts from Mizuki Shigeru's horror folklore series, Gegege no Kitaro, have been stalking Jr's Sakai Line since 1993 in the form of character themed trains. The four trains feature Kitaro, Neko Musume, Medama Oyaji, and most recently Nezumi Otoko. Each train is decorated like Kitaro's vest with black-and-yellow striped trim, but today the odious Nezumi Otoko received a suitably avarice paint-over.

Picture from Net Nihonkai Newspaper

Bam, solid gold! Or is it week old urine? Either one fits the greedy rat bastard. And think how stylin' you'll be when you roll int the Yokai Amusement Park. It's the next best thing to a ghost train, and it won't actually drag you to Hell, unlike some other Cat Buses that I know.

Ugly Legend

(DISCLAIMER: The following is the English approximation of an article which was originally published in the November 10th issue of Spa! Direct your disgust towards them. The only thing we're guilty of is not bringing it to you sooner!)

Weekly men’s entertainment magazine Spa! enlists the help of science to put an end to the age-old question: Why do so many white guys date fugly Japanese girls? Beginning with Yoko Ono, Westerners have continued to show a preference for women outside of the spectrum of beauty accepted by Japanese society as a whole. You know the type—Long, straight black hair, squinty eyes, flat face. Or maybe, as recent research suggests, you don’t know, hence the problem.

Ever wake up next to this?

Obviously there must be something wrong with the Gaijin brain that keeps them from being able to tell the difference between girls that look like living woodblock prints and CanCan models, so scientists ran two white dudes infamous for their questionable taste in women through an MRI-scan to check for loose wiring. The results? Our friendly foreigners showed lower brain activity than 70 year-old women!

"Journey inside the brains of the white men who love gross girls!"

Let's meet tonight's guinea pigs. Zidi from France is new to Japan and infamous in his circle of friends for picking up slags in Roppongi. We also have Phillip from England, who during his seven years in the country has grown out of the "so long as it's breathing" phase that seems to affect many foreigners. The MRIs will be conducted by PhD Hideo Nakajima.

The lack of activity in the occipital lobe, which controls visual processing and thus face recognition, would suggest that the two men’s brains lack the processing power to differentiate between butter faces and beautiful babies.

"His big honkey nose almost gets caught on the machine!"

Stepping off the plane for the first time, all Japanese look the same. The traditional image of Orientals with black hair and narrow eyes has been planted deep into the Western psyche by movies and other media. Men come to Japan with a permanent set of beer goggles, and the problem is intensified by this inexplicable sense of familiarity.

“Hey, I feel like I’ve seen you somewhere before…”

The part of the lobe that handles facial recognition is extremely active while we are young children but slows down as we age. Therefore we can conclude that Zidi, who dates ugly girls, has low brain activity because this region has yet to kick in, while Philip, who has since refined his taste in women, has low brain activity because it has been trained over the years and can now differentiate faces even from a state of rest.

Dr. Nakajima explains. “Monkeys all look the same at first, but after careful observation you can begin to see the small differences between them.” The aesthetic eye can be trained. There’s still hope! Your days of being ridiculed as “Beast Master” may soon be at an end.

He concludes, “It takes courage to walk outside with a skank on your arm. I’d like to do further research to see if the men’s brains are releasing serotonin—they’d have to be doped up to stay with these butter faces. But then again, if the find these girls pleasant enough company to release serotonin, then their brains must truly be broken.”

The Hairy Butt Burger Incident (ケツ毛バーガー事件）

Submitted for the approval of the October 2009 Japan Blog Matsuri, I call this story...

Those of you living in Japan or studying Japanese are likely familiar with the social networking site, Mixi. Mixi is similar to Myspace with a few important differences. New users need an invite from a preexisting member to enter the network. There is a “footprints” system that tracks other users who have visited your profile. Also, while the search system allows you to find people by name and location, most people are registered under a pseudonym, making it nearly impossible to zero in on a particular person. Compare this to Myspace’s service which accurately locate people within minutes using only their zip code and last name!

My Japanese friends are amazed at how much information us Westerners voluntarily put up in plain view for anyone with a Yahoo account to peruse. Even with the safeguards afforded by Mixi’s closed network, Japanese people tend to be hesitant about putting traceable personal information online. While this could be chalked up to cultural differences, urban legends such as the Hairy Butt Burger Incident play an important part as well.

Image courtesy of the fiends at Uncyclopedia

Flashback to October 2006. Mixi had finally his its stride after launching in April 2004 and was attracting around one million new users per quarter. Users still felt secure in their digital backyards, some even registering under their real names. For a certain unwitting young couple, this powder keg of complacency was primed to explode and take everything precious to them with it.

The boyfriend received a computer virus over the file sharing program Winny, which then leaked compromising pictures he had taken of his girlfriend to other users. The pictures immediately found their way onto 2channel, the world's largest anonymous BBS and home to a rogue's gallery of ruthless Internet trolls. The denizens of 2channel took time out of their busy schedule of organizing phone bombing and slander campaigns to find the boyfriend's Mixi, registered under his real name, using information leaked from his Winny account. From there all it took was a click to find his girlfriend’s profile, also registered under her real name.

There they found details about her job as a juvenile parole officer. The trolls smelled blood. In their Internet feeding frenzy they stripped the couple of every last shred of decency, resulting in a veritable dung heap of posts that encouraged users to torment the couple's friends on Mixi by posting the illicit pictures in question along with defamatory messages, not to mention the obligatory threatening phone calls to their places of employment. Sleazy weekly tabloids jumped on the story, and there were even unconfirmed rumors that the girlfriend committed suicide after losing her job over the incident.


Mixi was quick to respond with a mighty swing of their ban hammer, excommunicating not only the users directly involved, but everyone on their friends list as well. Hundreds of accounts vanished overnight. After the dust settled, both users and the media alike called the responsibility of social networking site moderators into question. Mixi denied all involvement, and while stock prices temporarily dropped, registration numbers continues to climb. The incident has since become an Internet meme of sorts, and has even spawned an independent comic!

The only loose end in this unfortunate tale is, well, where did the name Hairy Butt Burger come from? As such graphic imagery would violate the rules of the Japan Blog Matsuri I'm not at liberty to say, but curious readers can Google their way to the truth. But we warned. Once you sink your teeth into those juicy buns, there's no forgetting the flavor.

Chikan: A Real Pain in the Ass

According to this article, the police are putting the squeeze on train perverts in a week-long national campaign to rub out the groping problem. Unsurprisingly, several chikan were pinched almost immediately.

While I am no molestation advocate, I would hate to see the day when my station isn't plastered in these always awesome posters:

"Your courage could save her ass"

"Now leaving Molesterville, next stop Prisonland"
(That's an extremely loose translation)

If JR really cared, they would get with the times and make ladies only cars. Anyone out there have a chikan story? I was reverse-molested on the Shonan-Shinjuku line last year by a lady in her forties.

Homeless Japanese Hold Blackface Michael Jackson Dance Party

The September issue of MADMAX Magazine contained a short article on, as the title suggests, a group of homeless men who dress up in Michael Jackson costumes and hold dance parties in Shinjuku's Chuo Park.

Thrilling! Say Beat It to your Bad Life!Japan's ongoing recession has left Shinjuku's Chuo park flooded with homeless. Our reporters happened to be interviewing three such homeless men in their fifties when word of Michael Jacksons's death came in.

When Michael fever was taking the world by storm twenty years ago, these men still had a respectable job and roof over their heads, rocking with the King of Pop every step of the way. They, too, once glittered like a rhinestone glove.

However, as if in response to the sudden drop in Michael's popularity, Japan's economic bubble, along with these men's lives, went POP! When the smoke cleared, they found themselves living on the streets.

"Michael's gone..." The stunned mourners decided then and there to fill the void MJ left behind. After they scrubbed the filth from their bodies and traded in their ragged clothes for flashy costumes, all it took was a little face paint to transform them into the Jackson Three. They just needed a dance floor to return to the days when they shimmered brighter than any disco ball!

The vigor of youth soon returned to their sweat-drenched faces as they cut a rug to all the Michael classics. "Now that we've come this far, there isn't anything we can't achieve!" The three have sworn to carry out Michael's comeback for him, dancing on as the King of Pop watches from his throne in heaven.

My first reaction to this was "Oh no! Blackface!" The story is actually kind of touching, though. 90% of me suspects that these dudes were just put up to this by MADMAX's staff, but 10% of me really wants to believe that they are legit.

If you go out to buy a copy of this for yourself, be forewarned that MADMAX's normal content involves yakuza killing reports, motorcycle gang interviews, hyper-violent manga and a ton of porn, not to mention 1000s of perverse advertisements that blow the porn out of the water. I may have to post some of them in the near future...